>>>If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.

And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law. It shouldn’t have taken this long to see what has always been staring us in the face.<<<

Exactly. This is what Trumpism really is. Not law and order, not equality, not democracy, but us vs. them. Lie for your co-conspirators, your “family”, slander other groups, weaken them, crush anyone competing with you for authority even if it’s the other branches of your own government. This is why having Trump in power is dangerous, he’s trying to use government power the way a mafioso uses his lieutenants. He wants to drag us back to Jim Crow, the clan, the Crusades, mob violence, because in that atmosphere he is powerful. He is powerful when our vision darkens and instead of a nation we see ourselves as nothing but a thuggish brood, when our heart darkens and we feel that only people like ourselves deserve mercy and that laws are only for oppressing others, when our mind darkens and we lose any grip on the facts of this world and project our own twisted fears onto everything unfamiliar.

If we can stay a nation of laws, if we hold fast to the principles that so many have sacrificed for, to raise humanity up from blood and soil and brute instinct to a higher loyalty, to a universal brotherhood and sisterhood, to be committed to the truth and willing to sacrifice for the stranger even when it means loss and failure — if we can do that, then we can shrink Trump and his ilk down to the sick joke they have always been. Then we will survive him.

Then we’ll be able to continue the journey we’re on, the journey to perfect our love, to live in the light of truth, to cultivate our humanity until it blooms into a glorious maturity the likes of which the world has never seen, when all of us will know for a fact in our hearts and in our minds that every person and every living thing on this earth is a sacred gift.